The Girl Who Wasn't There by Ferdinand von Schirach

Author:Ferdinand von Schirach
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Tags: Detective and Mystery Fiction
ISBN: 9780349140476
Publisher: Abacus
Published: 2013-09-10T23:00:00+00:00

RED

At one in the morning, Monika Landau was still at the desk in her office. She was forty-one years old, and had been working for the last six years in the capital offences department as one of the public prosecution team. The photograph of the young woman who had been abducted was lying in front of her. TV and the Internet had been showing it for hours. The police had found the photo in the suspect’s apartment; he had papered his walls with huge prints of it. He had also painted a red cross on the picture above his bed with his fingers. The report from Forensics said that it was only animal blood – a way of putting it that did not reassure anyone.

It had all begun with the call to the police which, like all emergency calls, had been recorded. The caller was a woman; her voice sounded young, at a guess she was about sixteen or seventeen years old. She was frightened, she said, she was lying in the boot of a car. The man had bitten her in the head. She gave the suspect’s name and the street where he lived. And then she said something else, in a very low voice, indistinctly. The police thought she had to whisper so that her abductor couldn’t hear her. ‘He’s evil,’ said the young woman, or perhaps it was, ‘He is the Evil…’ Landau couldn’t make it out properly. After that the connection was cut.

After the call, a patrol car went to the address; that was routine. The officers found a torn, blood-stained dress in a dustbin in the yard there. That was enough for the investigating magistrate to issue a search warrant. Less than an hour later, investigators were ringing the suspect’s doorbell. He opened the door to them. He seemed calm.

They found traces of blood on the floor beside his bed. The forensic pathologist said they matched the blood of the woman whose dress had been found in the dustbin. There was a chest under the bed containing sadistic porn films, handcuffs, whips, blindfolds, gags, vibrators and anal chains. There were scales of skin on the handcuffs and the whips; they, too, came from the unknown woman.

All the equipment one would need for an autopsy was in a metal container in the wardrobe, among the man’s shirts: scalpels, clamps, skull splitters, an electric bone saw.

A few hours later, the officers knew that on the day when the woman phoned the police the suspect had hired a car. The police commandeered it from the car hire firm. They found tiny traces of blood in the boot, and again the DNA was the same. The suspect had driven 194 kilometres in the car, so helicopters searched within a radius of a hundred kilometres round Berlin. The choppers, with heat-seeking cameras on board, had been flying over the woods and fields surrounding the city for hours, but they all knew how helpless they were – the area was simply too large.

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